


Holding on

by starlingale



Category: God's Own Country (2017)
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-21
Updated: 2017-11-21
Packaged: 2019-02-05 04:45:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12787248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starlingale/pseuds/starlingale
Summary: Running a farm is complicated.





	Holding on

On Johnny's list, he first thing to do after arriving home was bringing up Gheorghe to his room, in the face of God and his family, and then closing the door on them and using the resulting privacy to its fullest. (Which translated into practically falling from shower to bed and sleep, but they were at least in each other's arms, and tomorrow was theirs, too). The second thing, besides taking care of the farm, his father, and getting a wider bed, was selling the RV, which amounted to announcing the situation in the face of all neighbourly gossip. What he did not except was Deidre coming up with a third point of her own, and enforcing it too, right after their first sunday dinner.

“We must agree on a pay for you, Gheorghe, even if you choose to stay here and share with us. You need the safety of your life not depending on this relationship.” Johnny could feel his anger rising, but it was quickly covered in shame: yes, he has not been reliable even recently. And put like this, this sounded like her tales of scandals from her youth, with wives being pushed in impossible situations. 

The discussion lasted half a hour and consisted mainly of pointed stares, but by the end Gheorghe had some entirely theoretical wages, which he accepted out of politeness towards his gran, and he had the satisfaction of knowing that he stayed with him, even if this made him face blood-chillingly awkward conversations. 

Johnny was convinced that she would campaign for a pre-nup as soon as he breathed a word about marrying (a concept that was begun to slowly solidify from part of a shameful, secret little fantasy of keeping Gheorghe by his side by doing absolutely anything, to a possibly necessary safety measure during a summer of advances in the Brexit process), which made him confused, embarrassed and definitely silent on the topic.

He should not cling to Gheorghe too much - they barely know each other, for God's sake! - he should leave him his space to decide how deep he was into this whole thing, his rational mind told him, which was confusingly supported by his old impulses of finding safety by pushing people away, and even more confusingly contradicted by the way Gheorghe seemed to light up from his displays of affection and need. His mind kept being jumbled, but the routines and safety they were slowly building had passed by the mess and went straight to his heart, so his spinning dilemmas, instead of being stopped by finding some mathematically perfect solution, were just slowly running out of steam. 

As for the question of money, what happened in reality was much more fluid - the buyer of the RV, a stranger from out of town, happened to give the money to Gheorghe and Johnny felt that this was somehow his due, so it remained his. Their finances kept mixing, and by the time Johnny has offhandly lended his card and codes to him, so he could go to a shopping trip while he stayed home helping Martin, it took them three days to recognize the moment for the watershed it was. 

It was a busy summer, both with running the farm and with getting up to date with the financial context of what to do with it next. Gheorghe knew too much about farming to overvalue his own expertise (without knowing the movements of the market and navigating the maze of EU and UK regulations and subsidies, the best farmer's skills would be useless), so with him not having a reason to find out these things as they applied to the UK of 2016, and Johnny having been for the last year or two, not to put too fine a point on it, otherwise engaged, they needed to relearn the context from scratch. The Saxbies were up to the word in the pub and what ended up in the newspapers they read, but they needed to be the best-informed they could be to survive. 

Imagining that they have a chance was exhilariating, and Johnny sometimes felt even less safe now than in the alcohol-induced haze his life has been before, where a pressing sense of inevitable doom was mixed with the last traces of a childish acceptance that however Dad choosed to run things, it must be the correct way. The more he managed to actually believe in a future, the more scary the obstacles became. If it wasn't for Gheorghe's ability to take him out from a spiral of worries so easily, he would have spent his days with his mind generating one scenario of failure after another. Luckily he was also in love, so the words “stop farming in your head and come here” weren't even necessary in the evenings.

In june Leave won, which has led to clarifying their strategy becoming even harder – it felt like an earthquake in the middle of a tightrope act. And to an altercation in the pub, despite the growing number of people who were old friends of the family and were gradually warming up to the stranger with such an obvious good influence on that Saxby boy. The way Gheorghe's attacker was held back by the people from the next table was just one of the growing set of unlikely things Johnny couldn't even have imagined a year before. Nevertheless, he did manage to get a shiner out of the experience, which has been kissed better with utmost efficiency. And it was good to punch someone tangible, as the political powers which made Gheorghe's continued stay more difficult were too complex to work one's adrenaline surge out on.

Part of the research on what to do was explaining to Gheorghe what exactly they were doing with the farm before, and why. This has turned into a series of evenings with Deidre telling the tale of the farm, from even before the time of her coming here, based on what she heard from her in-laws, with Martin listening intently and inserting a few choice words here and there. Johnny has never had the whole story explained to him in such an explicit way before, and the tale of his family adapting to succeeding sets of circumstances made him feel part of a continuity even in his intentions of reform themselves. The way of doing things he grew into, and which he came to see as natural (or, gradually, hopelessly dusty and irrational) proved to have been the best possible answer to a series of constraints in the past, and he came to appreciate Martin more for having come up with them. 

Being told all these things as an equal partner was also incredibly healing. It was beyond strange that hearing tales of narrowly avoiding major losses in the late '70s could make him feel light and giggly in the aftermath. But strange was his life now, with sheep cheese in the fridge and waking up with warm arms around him. (He also has developed a habit of meditating on the worn picture of a waterfall, moved up to the wall near the head of their shared bed, in mornings when he did not have the heart to wake Gheorghe yet. He tried to guess if a better print of the same place would make a nice present or not, but he could imagine the risk of... insulting an old memory by wanting to replace it with a shinier, emptier one, maybe? For all his lover's emotional openness in certain areas, he was sometimes hard to read about things pertaining to Romania. The picture was a postcard, but there have been no hand-written words on the back. He did note the location, though – it was in Romania indeed, in Timiş county, whatever this might have meant. He hoped they would visit it one day.

The way a farm is run has a lot of inertia built in, as one can't just replace the seeds in the ground and the saplings in the garden. This has meant that, at least, the amounts of decisions to make in the spring and summer were easy to cope with. They did sell some cheese, but finding the right kind of hipsters who would have even given it a try was the kind of work they had to leave for the winter. (Or should they sell those in minority communities? What cultures even value sheep cheese, besides romanian, and where do they do their shopping in large enough numbers?) They tried to do better with the crops and animals they have already started out with, but the major decisions could be postponed to the fall and next year's spring. 

One variable was the speed with which Brexit would be implemented. They decided to bet on there being at least one more summer when migrant workers could still technically work there, but in smaller numbers (being understandably discouraged), which in turn would lead to labour-intensive fruits and vegetables selling relatively well. They agreed on a deadline for coming up with a detailed plan, so by the time they had to start ploughing they had officially had stopped making plan Bs, Cs and Ds, and agreed to stick to the carefully written out final copy of the plan in Gheorghe's notebook. 

It was around that time when Johnny had finally managed to bring up the topic of money again. He has been collecting his courage for days, and had only managed to do it in the end by repeating to himself where the lack of communication can lead. (Gheorghe later said that in romanian, the expression for that last push of courage was "to take one's heart between his teeth", which sounded more than apt.) The conversation proved surprisingly cathartic for how little it had changed their life, given the degree to which their finances have been already tangled together. But having things out in the clear made him feel almost as happy as having proven to himself to be the kind of person who can make things explicit.

Johnny didn't learn to cook, between being too busy with Martin and having managed, on a memorable occasion, to ruin polenta, a dish consisting of cornmeal, water and salt, intended as a gesture of ethnic good will, or at least having read the wikipedia article on romanian food and grabbing the opportunity to try the simplest of them all. Gheorghe has teased him about it, but with a smile that kept the nastier parts of his shame at bay, and then they cooked it together, so now he can make it out of spite. But normally he physically did not have the time. They developed a system instead where Gheorghe had helped Deidre when he could, learning her recipes and lightening her workload, and had asked on certain days to have the run of the kitchen, with Deidre often ending up helping him out of curiosity. Chatting about themselves directly was not how their relationship worked, but food was connected to their lives in ways that was easier to share. As the summer marched on, the tangents in their conversation had slowly grown in proportion.

It took a lot of research, but Johnny had found a shop online that was willing to send him seeds of aromatic herbs used in romanian traditional cooking - fruits and vegetables were to present more of a challenge, with the difference in climate and all, but he had a row of pots on a windowsill with soft little seedlings that filled him with warmth whenever he thought of them. Because Gheorghe didn't know what those were, but they were growing more distinctive every day, and there would be a time when he would look at them, recognize them, and understand that he is that little bit more loved than he'd thought.

**Author's Note:**

> for anybody who actually knows things about farming: sorry.


End file.
